Page 22 of The Edge of Never

“It’s freezing cold, I’m tired, but I want to get off this mountain so badly, I’ll do anything to make it happen. Take of that what you will.”

Thane closed his eyes for a long moment, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his gloved fingers. When he dropped his hand, he opened his green eyes and gave me a half-smile.

“We’ll keep the rope on. Visibility is shite. I dinnae want us getting separated.”

“No complaints from me.”

If I had my way, I would wrap myself around him to make sure I didn’t get lost, but that wouldn’t be practical at all. Also, I didn’t think he would appreciate me hanging off him like a limpet. It didn’t matter if I wanted to soak up all his warmth to ward off the chill. We had a job to do. To get down this mountain. And the only way to do that was to keep going.

“Then let’s get moving.”

So I followed Thane down the slope, knowing it would take all my energy reserves to make it out of here in one piece with the hours of walking we had left to go.

Eight

Thane

In all the times I’d walked in the winter, there had never been an occasion when conditions had been quite this dire. Our progress down the mountain was far slower than I wanted it to be.

I’d only taken this route once before in the summer months. The landscape didn’t look the same covered in snow with a blizzard surrounding us. I had a hard time navigating us through it. Of course, my phone had GPS, but it was spotty as fuck up here where we had no signal. The bad weather made it infinitely worse, so there was no point in me attempting to use it.

I’d learned how to navigate with a map when I was young, but this was testing all of my skills. Especially since I had to keep an eye on Kit at the same time.

To Kit’s credit, they were being quite the trouper, but I could tell they were exhausted. In all honesty, I was too. The walk up the mountain had taken it out of me. I was using my almost depleted reserves to get us out of this. It was hard not to let Kit see the extent of my tiredness. They were relying on me. I had to be the strong one for both of us. I told them earlier I wouldn’t let them die out here, and I intended to keep to my word.

When we finally made it down into a glen sandwiched between two mountains, the sun had long set, and we were navigating by the light of our head torches. It was on the opposite side of the mountain we needed to be. However, I had no other choice but to take us down this way.

A part of me knew we might have to stop and stay here until morning, but the need to push on to get Kit somewhere warm and dry drove me forward.

My plan was to cross the stream less than a few metres ahead of us and then take a break. We could eat something, regain our strength, and reassess our situation.

I paused when we reached it, bringing Kit to a halt beside me. They eyed the water with scepticism written all over their features. The water level was higher than I’d seen it in the summer, and it was flowing quite fast. What was usually a stream now looked more like a small river.

“Are you going to tell me we have to cross this?” they asked, looking up at me with wide eyes.

Kit had taken their glasses off a while ago because the snow was making it too wet to see. It meant they had to stick a lot closer to me since they told me they were short-sighted.

“Aye.”

They let out a sigh and scrunched up their face.

“Well, that’s just great.”

We were running out of time, energy, and options. This was the only route we could take if we had any chance of getting close enough to civilisation to get ourselves out of this.

“Here, ye see those rocks.” I pointed out several large ones sticking out of the stream. “We’ll use those tae cross.”

Kit squinted their eyes at them.

“I need my glasses.”

I nodded and waited for them to extract their frames from a pocket in their jacket. Kit slid them on their face and eyed the stream again.

“They don’t look very stable.”

“We take it slow. Ye go first and I’ll follow.”

We remained tethered together. I didn’t want to take the rope off for fear we’d lose each other in the blizzarding snow. It had slightly lessened now we were on a lower elevation, but it was making visibility poor and our journey far more perilous.

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